New Year Clean-Up

Right now families across Vietnam and China are preparing their homes for the upcoming Lunar New Year celebrations. Traditionally this is the time to clean and organize your home, setting the tone for the upcoming year. With this year's Lunar New Year being so close to Western New Year we thought it was a great opportunity to clean up the piles of everything that have accumulated since our wedding 6 months ago! We dedicate a whole weekend to a thorough clean-up and re-organization. First up was our utility closet with miscellanous items left from the wedding, a banker's box full of paper and stuff just shoved in any available space on the bookshelves waiting to topple over. We wish we had thought of taking a picture before, but it was pretty embarrassing, we couldn't even see the floor. With some help from clear bins, boxes and plastic tubs everything now has its place.

The wooden and paper boxes were all from Ikea. The plastic bins are from our local supermarket Fred Meyers and the small plastic tubs were from terrific Japanese dollar store Daiso. We couldn't believe all the places where we had paper stored all over the house, now it's all in one place and easy to get to.

While packing for our short visit to Seattle it became clear how badly we let things pile up. We finally gathered, purged and put our toiletries in one place, tossing out old out-dated items.

Next we tackled the coat closet. We added another shelf above to accommodate new wedding gifts that needed storage space. Being able to see all our coats, jackets, hats, scarves, gloves, bags and sunglasses without digging through items in the wrong place is a dream.

Party favors from the wedding, birthday cards, bills, check stubs, missing buttons, hardware for the windows, gift wrapping ribbons, mementos and trinkets; these items could be found in any room in our house, but we are slowly digging our way out and setting ourselves up to keep the pile-up from happening again.

Happy New Year Everyone.

May the Year of Dragon find us ahead of the curve and not under piles of stuff.